Modded funny for some reason ... of course, I'm not sure this still holds true for today's cars, but what used to happen when you shift into neutral is that the engine gets disconnected physically from the wheels - it can keep accelerating all it wants but the car will slow down.

[quote]Let's say you and the plumber are both paying 25%. Then, you initially earned $133; the government taxed you 25%, which is $33.33, and now you have $100 left. Now you give that $100 to the plumber, who in turn has to give $25 of that income (25%) to the government. $75 of your $133 has arrived in the plumber's hands, actually paying for the plumbing work. Your actual tax rate here is 75/133 which is about 56% - not the 25% that it initially appears to be.[/quote]

But in that scenario, the plumber is paying 0% tax. You can't count the $25 he sends to the IRS as taxation both for you and him. Your personal tax payment to the government is exactly the 25% they say it is. I'm not a big fan of sales tax either (it's far too heavy a burden for people with low incomes), but since the alternative would be heavier taxation of properties and wealth, you can guess the odds of that happening ...

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Why yes, I _am_ a card-carrying communist!

Clearly, to lift the ban on stem cell research, we must come up with a weapon application for it, or describe how it can be used to catch terrorists ...

Admittedly, this is not the issue, but this is still the people who will keep the money you pay on Wednesday until Monday before passing it on to the company you paid the bill to. And this is the computer age ...

A financial revolution is long overdue.

Worse (IMO), the head of Sweden's anti-piracy board's kids has been threatened. While I certainly don't agree with the lawsuit, I don't agree with the methods emplyed by people fighting back either.

It IS that exploitable, I once paid a bill twice and a few weeks later I received a cash order for the amount I paid (once). I'm not sure if the lawyer's firm has these routines, but most big companies in Sweden will keep track of bills paid and if they receive payment with an ID that's already paid (OCR-nubmer, as it's called in Swedish), they will send a cash order for the amount.

Bit of a name mixup here, what he meant was that USA has not agreed to be bound by the international warcrime court in Hague. And while the US may have signed the Geneva Convention, Guantanamo and similar stories from Iraq demonstrate a clear disregard for it by the previous administration.

How in the hell is calling STUDness a porn name racist?

Dude ... the reason it's so often a word-against-word case is because most rape victims tend to get home as fast as they can, take a loooong shower and often throwing away or maybe even burning the clothes they wore. If it goes as far as trial (which it usually doesn't), it's often described as a second rape, with the defense attorney doing his/her best to show that the accuser has a history of random sexual encounters and that the defendant could not have realised that it was not consentual. There's a crapload of books and reports based on court cases if you'd like to know what reality looks like.

I should know, since I'm a rapist. And as far as I know, the girl never even reported it to the police, because she just wanted to forget it ever happend. The "falsly accuse someone of rape to get revenge for something else" is just a myth, and one that continues to destroy their victims every day.

This might just be because we Swedes are prudes, but it is actually illegal to walk around naked in a public place here. I can't say what it's like in other European countries but I believe that public nudity is generally illegal, with special "nude beaches" and suchlike thrown in here and there.

Some might say that, others will say that the psychological model used in free-market theories doesn't seem to reflect human behaviour (except upper management, but they've been diagnosed as psychopaths long ago, so ...).

Well, either the subsistence-farmers-turned-factory-workers disagree with you or they are unable to get any arable land for subsistence farming ...

No they wouldn't. Aside from extracting electric energy from a reaction, one of the main differences between f. ex. a nuclear powerplant and a nuclear bomb is that we can control the speed of the reaction. This includes the option to produce less electricity when demand is lower (or when profits need to go up, but we can skip that for now).

No to this one as well, for pretty much the same reason. Water that doesn't get "used" stays in the pipes, so if you reduce your consumption then overall consumption drops as well.

What the parent means is that CO2 that is bound in trees will get released back into the atmosphere fairly soon after the tree dies even without human intervention, while the CO2 released
by burning oil/coal/gas would have remained bound for a long time if we hadn't extracted it.